Introducing himself in his official capacity, Stephens spoke briefly about the treaty he was sent to Central America to negotiate, though it must have seemed awkward if not absurd at the moment. Morazán said he regretted deeply that it had not been accomplished. “He expressed his sorrow for the condition in which I saw his unhappy country,” Stephens recalled. “Feeling that he must have more important business, I remained but a short time, and returned to the house.”
That night Stephens tried in vain to arrange for a guide to help him reach the inaptly named Río Paz, or River of Peace, which separated El Salvador from Guatemala. The prospects were not good. Every man capable of guiding him was in deadly fear of encountering Carrera’s men. Stephens was filled with trepidation as well, but he relished even less the bloody battle in Ahuachapán that would occur if Carrera arrived while Morazán was still in residence.
The next morning Morazán came to the house. Their conversation this time was “longer and more general.” Stephens did not ask him his plans and the general alluded only to vague designs to confront the northern commander, General Cáscara, who now occupied the Salvadoran town of Santa Ana. “He spoke without malice or bitterness of the leader of the [Conservative] party, and of Carrera as an ignorant and lawless Indian, from whom the party that was now using him would one day be glad to be protected.” The general warned Stephens not to travel to Guatemala, as it was extremely unsafe. But if he insisted, Morazán said that he would send for the mayor and find him a guide.
I bade him farewell with an interest greater than I had felt for any man in the country. Little did we then know the calamities that were still in store for him; that very night most of his soldiers deserted, having been kept together only by the danger to which they were exposed while in an enemy’s country. With the rest he marched to Zonzonate, seized a vessel at the port, manning it with his own men, and sent her to Libertad, the port of San Salvador. He then marched to the capital, where the people, who had for years idolized him in power, turned their backs on him in misfortune, received him with open insults in the streets. With many of his officers, who were too deeply compromised to remain, he embarked for Chili. His worst enemies admit he was exemplary in his private relations, and, what they consider no small praise, that he was not sanguinary. He is now fallen and in exile, probably forever, under sentence of death if he returns. I verily believe they have driven from their shores the best man in Central America.8
Not long after Morazán left, an old man loyal to the general appeared before Stephens with his twenty-two-year-old son, whom he offered as a guide. But when the young man learned they would be going toward the Guatemalan border he excused himself saying he was going to get a horse; he never came back. A ten-year-old boy, dressed in a straw hat and riding bareback, was substituted instead. It was thought the little boy would run less risk from the soldiers prowling the countryside. Better a ten-year-old than no one, Stephens thought, and a short time later they set out on the road to Guatemala.
11
Reunion
I had finished a journey of twelve hundred miles,” wrote Stephens, “and the gold of Peru could not have tempted me to undertake it again.” The buildings and cobblestone streets were dark with blood as Stephens rode on his macho into the Guatemalan capital. In a passageway near the plaza, twenty-seven of Carrera’s Indians had set up a barricade outside the door of the city’s mint. When Morazán’s men finished their assault, twenty-six of the defenders lay dead or wounded, and ten days later their blood still blackened the steps. The whitewashed walls of the houses along the side streets were pockmarked with bullet holes and ruddy with splattered blood. All the structures fronting the central square were “fearfully scarified.” And at the U.S. consul’s house near the plaza, Stephens’s official residence, he was shown three musket balls that had been plucked from the woodwork for his inspection.
The city remained in shock. Morazán’s impossible defeat and the consequences of Carrera’s victory were all that people talked about. Meanwhile, Carrera and the main force of his army had left the capital. He had set out after Morazán but was diverted to Quetzaltenango to put down another uprising there. The soldiers who had been left behind as guards confronted Stephens as he took his first walk through the streets; they demonstrated how they had dispatched their enemies by pointing their muskets at his head. He hurried back to the safety of the consul’s residence.
In spite of the dangers still lurking in the streets, Stephens felt after months of hard travel that he had returned “home” to a place he could finally rest secure. “I still felt anxieties; I had no letters from home, and Mr. Catherwood had not yet arrived.”
The next afternoon, unexpectedly, Catherwood was at the door. He had just returned from a second visit to Copán, to which he had retreated while Morazán and Carrera battled for the city. “In our joy at meeting,” Stephens wrote, “we tumbled into each other’s arms.” They resolved for the remainder of their journey never to part again.
Over the next few days, the two men excitedly exchanged notes. During Stephens’s absence, Catherwood kept occupied with work. In addition to returning to Copán to make more drawings, he made an extraordinary discovery that again roused Stephens’s archaeological yearnings. Earlier, when traveling to the capital from their first visit to Copán, Catherwood had heard rumors of stone ruins buried in the jungle along the Motagua River not too far from Copán. Stephens had heard similar stories in Guatemala City from three brothers who had inherited a vast tract of land along the river. The Payes brothers said they were once told by their father that the land contained mysterious stone objects at a site the locals called Quiriguá, but they had never visited the land or seen the objects for themselves. It had been decided that while Stephens traveled to El Salvador, Catherwood would try to determine if there was any truth to the rumors.
Catherwood hit gold—but only after a complicated, arduous journey. After reaching the Motagua and enduring several dugout canoe rides through nearly unbearable heat and humidity, he and the Payes brothers hiked through spongy fields and forests of tall cedar and mahogany trees until they finally came upon a pyramid structure overgrown with vegetation. In quick order, they found a “colossal” carved head six feet in diameter and covered in moss, several stone altars sculpted with unusual animal-like features, and a large group of sculpted vertical stone blocks resembling the monoliths that Catherwood and Stephens had found in Copán. These bore carvings of human figures and were covered with hieroglyphics, executed in the same style as Copán but with one astounding difference—these monuments were gigantic. They soared two and three times the height of those they had found at Copán and were proportionally more immense in girth.
Based on notes and drawings Catherwood made, Stephens calculated that one “obelisk or carved stone” stood twenty-six feet out of the ground. “It is leaning twelve feet two inches out of the perpendicular, and seems ready to fall. . . . The side toward the ground represents the figure of a man, very perfect and finely sculptured. The upper side seemed the same, but was so hidden by vegetation as to make it somewhat uncertain. The two [sides] contain hieroglyphics in low relief.” Catherwood explained to Stephens they had discovered five other similarly enormous monuments that were still erect and two others that had toppled to the ground. There were fragments of stone and carvings scattered over a larger area, which indicated much more remained to be discovered. He worked as quickly as he could to make several rough drawings over the next day, but they had failed to bring along provisions and the Payeses had already gone on to another part of their estate. Catherwood soon followed.
Gigantic stela at Quiriguá. (Catherwood)
Going over his notes and sketches, Stephens and Catherwood speculated that Quiriguá must have had some affiliation with the larger site of Copán, some twenty-five miles to the south. “Of one thing there is no doubt,” Stephens wrote, “a large city once stood there; its name is lost, its history unknown; and, except for a notice taken from M
r. C’s notes, and inserted by the Senores Payes in a Guatimala paper after the visit, which found its way to [the United States] and Europe, no account of its existence has ever before been published. For centuries it has lain as completely buried as if covered in the lava of Vesuvius.”
Stephens relished the thought of seeing the site for himself. But there was not enough time to go to Quiriguá and get to Palenque before the start of the rainy season. Each site was located in a different direction.
There also were other official matters Stephens had to complete before they could leave. While his chief assignment ended with Morazán’s defeat and the final collapse of the republic, he also had orders to close up the mission, pack up the delegation’s archives, and ship them back to Washington. These affairs were settled quickly. And he sent a final detailed dispatch to Forsyth, which concluded with “After diligent search, no government was found.”
With the completion of his duties, Stephens wrote: “I was once more my own master, at liberty to go where I please, at my own expense, and immediately we commenced making arrangements for our journey to Palenque.”
In order to withdraw from the capital as diplomatically as possible, Stephens made the rounds of the Conservative Guatemala government, including its political chief of state, Mariano Rivera Paz. The leader provided him with a passport for his journey. To smooth his path, a favorable notice concerning his travel plans was placed in the government newspaper, El Tiempo. “But these were not enough,” Stephens wrote. “Carrera’s name was worth more than them all, and we waited two days for his return from Quetzaltenango.”
Meanwhile, he paid a visit to Narciso Payes, one of the three brothers on whose land Quiriguá was located. Although the discovery of the site was stunning, what excited Stephens most was its proximity to the Motagua River. Based on Catherwood’s calculations, the depth of the water indicated that one or more of the giant monuments could be transported by boat to the Gulf of Honduras and then by ship to New York City. He arrived at Payes’s doorstep to make a deal. After all, with minimum effort and his diplomat’s coat he had acquired the rights to the Copán ruins for fifty dollars. This time, however, his diplomatic cover worked against him. No matter how hard he tried to persuade Payes that he was acting as a private individual and thus did not have the monetary resources of the United States government behind him, Payes remained unconvinced. At any event, Payes continued, he would have to consult his brothers when they returned to Guatemala City in the next few days.
Stephens departed in frustration; the two brothers did not arrive before Stephens and Catherwood left for Palenque. But the odds of negotiating a deal were fading fast anyway. During the interval, Narciso Payes consulted with the French consul general, who informed him that his government had paid several hundred thousand dollars to acquire just one of the Egyptian obelisks of Luxor for transport to Paris.1 Before they had sought out the consul, Stephens wrote, “the owners would have been glad to sell the whole tract, consisting of more than fifty thousand acres, with everything on it, known and unknown, for a few thousand dollars.” Stephens remained optimistic, however, that a deal could still be worked out, and he left an undisclosed offer with a friend to be presented when the two Payes brothers returned.2
Palenque beckoned. After only a week in Guatemala City, Stephens and Catherwood had gathered supplies, mules, and horses and were prepared to start. But people arriving from outside the city still warned of dangerous roads. And nearly everyone they met urged them to reconsider. An aide-de-camp of Colonel MacDonald arrived from Belize and ran into Stephens at an official gathering. He informed him for the first time of the Walker-Caddy expedition to Palenque. The news was not good, he added. The two men had been killed by the Indians, speared to death, according to the latest accounts received at Belize. This, as Stephens was to learn later, was untrue. The greatest apprehensions, however, came from rumors filtering back from Carrera’s campaign in Quetzaltenango, through which Stephens and Catherwood were to pass on their way to Palenque. Carrera, it was whispered, had committed yet more atrocities, the Indians had risen up, and they were massacring whites.
Waiting to meet Carrera for a personally signed passport, Stephens decided to take a last stroll through the suburbs of the city. He was entranced once again by the natural beauty of the place and especially the volcanoes Agua, Fuego, and Acatenango, not far in the distance, standing like guardians over a troubled Garden of Eden. Then he was drawn, as he so often was, to a nearby cemetery. It had been established in the time of the cholera outbreak but now served also as a final resting place for more than four hundred men killed in the recent contest for the city. Their bodies lay tumbled together under a large square of newly turned earth. “It was a gloomy leave-taking of Guatimala,” he wrote.
The next day the rumors about Quetzaltenango were confirmed. The violence had been set in motion two weeks earlier when a message reached Quetzaltenango that Morazán had attacked and successfully occupied Guatemala City. In response to the news, the townspeople of Quetzaltenango rose up and drove Carrera’s garrison from their city. Then city officials made the mistake of sending a letter of congratulations by courier to Morazán. Carrera learned of the uprising during his march in pursuit of Morazán. He altered his course instantly and marched off for Quetzaltenango. With great trepidation, the city’s leaders gathered in the plaza to meet him. Just as he arrived, the Indian courier, who had never traveled to the capital as he was instructed, gave Carrera the city’s letter of congratulations meant for Morazán. For the municipal leaders, it was monumental bad timing. Carrera flew into such a fury listening to his secretary read the words that he drew his sword and wounded the mayor and two others before he somehow got hold of himself and stopped. He ordered his soldiers to seize the leaders and march them off to jail. The next day, he had the mayor and seventeen of the city’s leading men brought to the plaza. Then, Stephens wrote, “without the slightest form of trial, not even a drum-head court-martial,” one by one they were seated on a stone in front of the wall and executed.
Word then reached Guatemala City that upon Carrera’s return, he intended to march the hundreds of surviving Morazán prisoners into the plaza and have them all shot down as well. The fear in the city was palpable. “Again the sword seemed suspended by a single hair,” Stephens wrote.
Even among the adherents of the Carrera party there was a fearful apprehension of a war of castes, and a strong desire, on the part of those who could get away, to leave the country. I was consulted by men having houses and large estates, but who could only command two or three thousand dollars in money, as to their ability to live on that sum in the United States. Heretofore, in all the wars and revolutions the whites had the controlling influence, but this time the Indians were the dominant power. Roused from the sloth of ages, and with muskets in their hands, their gentleness was changed into ferocity. Carrera was the pivot on which this turned.
The day after Carrera returned, Stephens went to see him. Carrera was now living in a much larger house and his guards were more numerous and well appointed. When Stephens entered his chambers, the general was standing behind a table holding a gold chain in his hand. His military coat lay on the table and he had on the same “roundabout” jacket Stephens had last seen him in. His wife, the fiery, infamous Petrona, stood nearby examining a pile of gold necklaces with President Rivera Paz and one or two others. Stephens was immediately struck by how pretty, young, and delicate she looked. She was, Stephens noted, “not more than twenty, and seemed to have a woman’s fondness for chains and gold. Carrera himself looked at them with indifference.”
The general recognized him immediately. Despite all the trials Carrera had gone through over the last months, Stephens noted, he had lost none of his youthfulness: “His face had the same . . . quickness and intelligence, his voice and manners the same gentleness and seriousness, and he had again been wounded.” Stephens explained the purpose of his visit: his need of Carrera’s personal endorsement in his pa
ssport. Carrera took the passport out of Stephens’s hand and threw it on the table stating that he would draft a new one and sign it himself. He turned to his secretary and instructed him to make it out to the “Consul of the North.”
The secretary left and Carrera motioned for Stephens to join him at the table. The general revealed he had heard Stephens met Morazán during his retreat and asked about the encounter. Carrera then explained he was planning an assault on San Salvador in a week, with three thousand men. He noted that Morazán would have been driven from the plaza in Guatemala City much sooner if he had cannons. Stephens asked if the report was accurate that early in the battle he and Morazán had met. Carrera said it was true, that Morazán’s dismounted troopers had torn off Carrera’s holsters, that Morazán himself had gotten off one shot at him, and that he had gotten close enough to take a good slice at Morazán with his sword, but missed and cut his saddle.
Stephens wrote that he found the whole meeting bizarre: “I could not but think of the strange position into which I was thrown: shaking hands and sitting side by side with men who were thirsting for each other’s blood, well received by all, hearing what they had to say about each other, and in many cases their plans and purposes, as unreservedly as if I was a traveling member of both cabinets.”
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